Pics and description of my panel.

yaddatrance

I'm restoring a small CNC that was left outside in a gazebo by a buddy for a winter. It was a "I'll bring it back inside tommorrow" project that never happened.
I don't have pics of the state I got it in because I wasn't planning on making a post on it but it was pretty bad. I do have a pic from before it got sent to the doghouse.


The stepper motor bearings were rusty and the spindle control was shot. I replaced the enture headstock (spindle, motor & drive unit) with a spare head I had laying around from another project... A few years ago I made several machines that took spent 5.56 brass and trimmed it down to make 300 AAC blackout blanks using sherline spindles with a cutoff saws which fed into a dillon press using a singulator... Can't find pics of the cutoff half, but here is a crappy photo of what was on the other side.


Anyways, control was a FlashCut system but corrosion made it unreliable so I needed a new control. I had put a DDCSv1.1 on a system a couple years ago and thought it was great as long as you stayed metric and designed the system around the control, so I ordered a RMHV3.1 (a DDCSV2.1 with different membrane) and some hybrid steppers.



Wow, the latest firmware packages make the system night and day from the old 1.1 firmware. I'm a fan of tactile switches so I was very excited when I read about usb keyboard support in the newer firmware's changelogs, so I set about making this new panel. One of my favorite controls is the very classic and venerable Fanuc 3/6 series... My "big" cnc uses a 6MB which, while not the fastest, is very reliable.



I even contemplated just stealing a spare keypad from a fanuc and wiring it up, the lower right corner in the image below has a mockup of a fanuc keypad.

but in the end I was looking for a panel about the size of a sheet of US Letter paper, which would be more appropriate for the smaller machine it's going on. I found a good sized box (263x182x60mm) on amazon (and aliexpress, but I'm usually too impatient to wait for overseas shipping) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0781D5YJH

While I was ordering I picked up a 19mm E-stop, a pack of cable glands and a monitor desk mount. I also ordered 16mm switches from china and found a pair of drawer pulls that looked right.

I drew up plans to cut the holes on the laser cutter. Making sure to dodge as much of the bumpy plastic parts as I could.

Once the box was cut I made labels and test fit the switches.



For years I used to make labels by laser printing on painter's blue tape and transfering with heat, but recently all the tape brands has a leather-like texture which makes it inconsistent. So this time I just printed on laser transparency. I drew the icons as vectors and you can download the svg of the icons in attachements.

frontpanelicons.zip (14.08 KB, Down times: 765)

2019-6-9 18:43 Uplaod

Click on the file name to download attach

I like the 16mm switches because you can take them apart and put the labels inside.



Wiring is matrix style to a teensy 3.1, really nothing special, though I added an I2C oled display so I wouldn't have to keep track of how the switches were wired and just display the matrix location afterwards. I didn't use ghosting diodes because you only press one button at a time.



I've attached arduino style code as FrontPanelFinal.zip in attachments

FrontPanelFinal.zip (1.58 KB, Down times: 790)

2019-6-9 18:42 Uplaod

Click on the file name to download attach

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACVRJU0yXPQ[/youtube]

So currently the panel looks like




and the machine as it stands tonite looks like



Its nowhere near complete as everything still needs to be routed through drag chains and it still needs to be setup for cooling and drain. Plus I want to powercoat the box.

Lindo

Amazing

I envy your skills with electronics.
Very well put together
Regards

John

rodrigo

oi amigo não consegui baixar os icon, nao abre

Xartan

Hello!

What a great job :-)

I really like how you solved the button issue.
Could you give me more details about how you solved it in arduino?

Thank you very much.

facu_dejota

Hi, congrats for this nice job.

I have the same question than Xartan!! How did you solve the buttons connection to the DDCS!!?

Thank you!!

yaddatrance

The arduino code is in the first post as "FrontPanelFinal.zip", I used a Teensy as my chip which is not a literal arduino, but it should work on many arduino models (just not the really old ones like the UNO without a lot of modification), just make sure the chip supports USB HID first. If you're working with a "true" arduino, make sure the chip is a 32u4 or SAMD microcontroller.

It uses the built in Keypad Library and is wired keypad "matrix" style with 6 rows and 4 columns. If your microcontroller supports internal pullups you can skip tying to 5V. https://playground.arduino.cc/Code/Keypad/


It relies on the arduino to enumerate as an USB HID Keyboard and uses the built in Keyboard library.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/HID

Lastly, in my code I used a cheap I2C oled and used the U8g2lib library
https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/u8g2/